As represented by Home Electric Appliance Recycling Law enforced on April, 2001 in Japan, by a growing interest in worldwide environment, more improvement in recycling efficiency of waste matter discharged in large amounts, achievement of a recycling rate which is the point of disposal criteria, and practice and acceleration of recycling of products and members with a minimum of cost have become a large problem in disposal of home electric appliances at present. As a result of that, large improvement cannot be expected by only efficiency of recycling practice of home electric appliances and there is an increasing need to incorporate efficiency improvement items of recycling disposal looking ahead to the future discard time into a design stage.
Flowcharts of a conventional recycling method are shown in FIGS. 23(a) and 23(b). FIG. 23(a) is a flowchart of the general case, and when a home electric appliance S100 was discarded S101 after the home electric appliance was used, landfill S102 was performed. In the case of previous discard of the home electric appliance, landfill disposal was generally performed. FIG. 23(b) is a flowchart of the case of passing disposal facilities, and when a home electric appliance S200 was discarded S201, waste products are first collected S202 by public institutions, professional agencies for handling waste products, distributors of home electric appliances, manufacturers and so on. The collected waste products are carried S203 into a recycling center. In the recycling center, with improvement in recycling efficiency, disposal by a disposal agency is being performed, but under the present circumstances, crushing S204 of the products by a crushing machine and further sorting S205 of materials by a sorting machine were performed and valuable substances S206 such as iron, copper or aluminum were recovered but in plastics, a small part of only the plastics easy to recycle was recycled S207 and the remainder were landfilled S208 together with dust.
With respect to such plastics, a proposal for forming a character etc. showing a construction material of a component on a surface of a plastic component so as to perform recycling simply has been made in JP-A-2000-233408 etc. which is a Published Unexamined Japanese Patent Application. Further, a proposal for representing indication that it is unnecessary to disassemble a synthetic resin assembly made of the same material on the assembly by a symbol or a particular character has been shown in JP-A-2000-267609 which is a Published Unexamined Japanese Patent Application. Further, the plastics have been defined as recyclable marks by ISO14021.
In the recycling center etc, performing partial separation (done by manual work, and hereinafter called manual scrapping work) which is a process before being put into a crushing machine (mechanical separation) has been advanced in recent years. Thus, in the manual scrapping work for performing partial separation, for example, a portion for including a large number of environmental impact substances and requiring special disposal, a relatively valuable portion, etc. are considered, but the manual scrapping work is done by decision of individual manufacturers or individual recycling agencies and there is no definite criterion and the case of a large cost burden is potentially passed up, with the result that a large problem arose as environmental measures. In the case that Home Electric Appliance Recycling Law is enforced in Japan, there was a problem that recovery cannot be made well even though the Law is enforced because only recoverable substances are recovered or relatively valuable substances (for example, gold) cannot be extracted and further substances having a bad influence on a crushing machine are also put into the crushing machine and thereby the bad influence is had on the crushing machine and so on. Also, there was a problem that scheduled recycling cannot be performed due to deformation or stain caused by handling at the time of recovery or during long-term use even for a product in consideration of recycling at a point in time of design. In the case of Japan, in addition to efficiency of recycling practice of home electric appliances discharged from 2001 based on the Law of Japan, there is no criterion as to how a future recycling rate aim could be brought to the present design products which will be discarded after ten years and ultimately, there is no criterion for aiming at the environmental load minimum as the whole life cycle of the product and there was a problem that cost of environmental measures becomes very high to result in the cause of the trouble in the future. In addition, since components including environmental impact substances, components generating value and components having an influence on the crushing machine are indefinite, disposal time to perform manual scrapping is long and further scrapping of the components having a bad influence on the crushing machine are missed and failure of the crushing machine is caused, so that a situation in which disposal cost necessary to perform recycling disposal increases has continued. As a result of this, there was a problem that a large burden of the environmental measures is put on all of the manufacturers, distributors, public institutions, etc. as well as recycling agencies and formation of recycling-oriented society is delayed and an influence is also had on positive challenges such as aiming at high efficiency and so on.